Sunday, October 12, 2008

Sprint Discussions: Release Planning

One of the discussions that happened during the sprint was about how to approach
the next PyPy release. There hasn't been a release since the end of the EU
period, which is not an optimal situation. Therefore we plan to make a 1.1
release at the beginning of next year, ideally before Pycon US. We'd also like
to move towards time-based releases. This will be greatly helped by the
new buildbot infrastructure, which allows us to decide when the
state of the codebase is stable enough to release.

Another goal of the release is to involve more people from the wider PyPy
community by having bugdays and generally asking for more support. This will be
particularly useful for bugs on platforms that no one of the core developers
group is using.

Feature-wise the release will mostly contain CPython 2.5 language support,
including some new extension modules (like ctypes, expat, sqlite).
In addition we plan to make it easier to actually install and use the PyPy
Python interpreter, which means some sort of proper installation procedure and
supporting distutils on top of PyPy. Another part of the release will be
support for fully sand-boxing an interpreter.

In contrast to our last release, we will focus mainly on PyPy's Python
Intepreter and more particularly its C-version. There are also various
experimental interpreters that PyPy contains, like for Prolog, Smalltalk,
JavaScript and Scheme. We also don't intend to put the LLVM and Javascipt
backends in the release, since they are essentially unmaintained and at least
partially broken. If anybody is particularly interested in one of these
components, please feel free to step up and take responsibility for them.
Another thing that the release won't contain is a JIT. I plan to make another
blog-post about this soon, stay tuned.

One of the discussions that happened during the sprint was about how to approach
the next PyPy release. There hasn't been a release since the end of the EU
period, which is not an optimal situation. Therefore we plan to make a 1.1
release at the beginning of next year, ideally before Pycon US. We'd also like
to move towards time-based releases. This will be greatly helped by the
new buildbot infrastructure, which allows us to decide when the
state of the codebase is stable enough to release.

Another goal of the release is to involve more people from the wider PyPy
community by having bugdays and generally asking for more support. This will be
particularly useful for bugs on platforms that no one of the core developers
group is using.

Feature-wise the release will mostly contain CPython 2.5 language support,
including some new extension modules (like ctypes, expat, sqlite).
In addition we plan to make it easier to actually install and use the PyPy
Python interpreter, which means some sort of proper installation procedure and
supporting distutils on top of PyPy. Another part of the release will be
support for fully sand-boxing an interpreter.

In contrast to our last release, we will focus mainly on PyPy's Python
Intepreter and more particularly its C-version. There are also various
experimental interpreters that PyPy contains, like for Prolog, Smalltalk,
JavaScript and Scheme. We also don't intend to put the LLVM and Javascipt
backends in the release, since they are essentially unmaintained and at least
partially broken. If anybody is particularly interested in one of these
components, please feel free to step up and take responsibility for them.
Another thing that the release won't contain is a JIT. I plan to make another
blog-post about this soon, stay tuned.